December 2017

Vapor IO, the definitive platform for edge clouds, today announced Vapor Kinetic Edge, a technical architecture for combining multiple Vapor Edge micro data centers into a virtual data center that can span an entire city and deliver a record-breaking twelve or more nines of availability. Vapor IO also today announced the Vapor Edge Module (VEM), a self-contained, standalone micro modular data center specifically designed to support edge co-location environments. These two advancements, combined with Vapor IO's existing edge products, complete a "cloud down" approach for delivering true cloud computing to the very edge of the last mile network.

"The edge is not a box. It's a highly-interconnected suite of hardware, software and connectivity working together in concert," said Cole Crawford, founder & CEO of Vapor IO. "Our Kinetic Edge architecture and the Vapor Edge Module deliver true edge cloud by being part of a complete portfolio of products, including our flagship Vapor Chamber, all of which work together to deliver on customer needs. It's not enough to provide bent sheet metal. You need to tie all of the components together with thoughtful engineering and software so you can algorithmically and autonomically orchestrate the edge."

Murex announced they will run their MX.3 technology platform on Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS).

With the acceleration of cloud adoption in capital markets, Murex and AWS agreed to collaborate to help clients migrate their Murex application workloads to the AWS Cloud. Murex clients are looking to consolidate more and more of their capital markets activity on the MX.3 platform and this means their need for infrastructure is increasing.

New regulatory requirements are also driving financial organizations to use cloud to scale up their computing capacity. Murex is collaborating with AWS to meet the demand from clients to support deployment of the Murex offering on the AWS Cloud. Murex is working on the validation of a range of deployment scenarios, from using AWS Cloud for bursting grid computing tasks through to complete migration to the AWS Cloud.

Gremlin helps companies build more resilient systems through a new engineering philosophy called chaos engineering. It is launching with the availability of its Gremlin tool and announcing Series A funding from Index Ventures and Amplify Partners. Starting today, any company will be able to employ chaos engineering to safely inject failure into systems in order to proactively identify and fix unknown faults - similar to an engineering flu shot.

Each year, North American businesses lose over $700 billion a year due to outages. In 2017 alone, major companies including Amazon, Whatsapp,Macys.com, and Slack have all experienced outages that impacted the bottom line and inconvenienced customers. This unreliability is due to the complexity gap in how distributed systems are built. Previously, software ran in a controlled, bare metal environment that introduced few variables, making it possible for engineering teams to identify potential risk and failures before they occurred. Within the last decade, systems have shifted to the cloud and become distributed with microservices and serverless methodologies, which introduced new dependencies on services outside of one's control - creating complexity for any team of engineers to fully understand. This makes failure and outages inevitable.

VMware, Inc., a global leader in cloud infrastructure and business mobility, in association with MIT Technology Review Custom, today revealed findings from a new global study focused on the adoption of multi-cloud environments. The research, "After Deployment Storms, Skies Turn Sunny For Multi-Cloud Environments," analyzed the attitude of more than 1,300 global IT decision makers in large enterprises toward cloud adoption.

A multi-cloud strategy is becoming more commonplace across a variety of organizations, regardless of the industry. Complications around vendor lock-in, data sovereignty, innovation and the need for workload-specific services are driving organizations to leverage multiple clouds to achieve business success. The study finds that while there are inherent challenges in deployment, the benefits are too consequential and only get better over time.

Datadog, the essential monitoring service for modern cloud environments, today announced Forecasts, a new feature that predicts when performance and stability issues will occur within cloud applications. While traditional monitoring solutions alert IT operations and engineering teams after a problem has already impacted user-experience and revenue-generating operations, Forecasts leverages artificial intelligence to alert teams days, weeks, or months in advance.

In highly distributed and dynamic cloud environments, planning for future performance issues and avoiding downtime can be difficult and labor-intensive. By applying machine-learning algorithms to massive amounts of data, Datadog can generate predictive analytics on everything from application performance to custom business metrics. This will reduce uncertainty and increase efficiency for businesses, putting the focus on actionable insights instead of troubleshooting problems after customers have already been impacted.

"Today, DevOps teams often receive critical alerts after their customers have been negatively impacted," said Brad Menezes, Datadog's Product Manager for artificial intelligence and machine learning. "Our forecasting algorithms have been fine-tuned based on trillions of data points across hundreds of thousands of servers daily. We can predict where a metric will be in the future, taking into account historical patterns, and notify users with plenty of time to prevent any negative impact. This directly translates into dollars saved and better user experiences - something every organization needs."

To increase business agility without incurring long-term capital costs, companies around the world are embracing cloud services, while seeking secure strategies to make their journey to the cloud. To help business customers tackle these challenges and fully embrace the benefits of flexibility and scale that are possible through cloud services, Citrix, a Gold level member of the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), announced that Citrix Cloud-based XenApp and XenDesktop services are now available in the Oracle Cloud Marketplace.

The ability to access Citrix Cloud services like XenApp and XenDesktop on Oracle Cloud Marketplace enables business customers to provide their workforce with more secure access to critical business apps and data on any device, while taking advantage of the scale, power and reliability of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

Talend, a global leader in cloud and big data integration solutions, today announced new courses designed to help advance developers' skills with cutting-edge cloud and big data technologies. Available immediately, the new courses are based on practical exercises that maximize employees' expertise with tools for data mapping and data preparation in the cloud. The new courses demonstrate Talend's commitment to cultivating a skilled workforce that will thrive in the new information age and help further companies' digital transformation initiatives.

"Keeping pace with modern technologies is challenging for companies of all sizes. While innovation fuels powerful business opportunities, it also creates skills gaps in areas such as cloud and big data--where the demand for skilled workers is especially high," said Carrie Anderson, VP of Enablement at Talend. "Data-driven companies need to develop their workforce to keep pace with rapidly evolving market needs and emerging technologies. Thus, training courses that give developers hands-on experience with the latest cloud and big data tools help give companies a competitive advantage."

Symantec Corp., a world leading cyber security company and Gold-level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), today announced that major cloud security components of its Integrated Cyber Defense Platform, including Control Compliance Suite, Data Center Security, Data Loss Prevention, Endpoint Protection, Cloud Data Protection, and Protection Engine solutions, are now available in the Oracle Cloud Marketplace.

A new LogicMonitor survey of nearly 300 industry influencers predicts that enterprises will migrate the majority of their IT workloads from the data center to the cloud by 2020. Fueling this transition will be the 20.8 billion IoT devices Gartner predicts will come online, and the rapid maturation of AI and machine learning technologies. The Future of the Cloud Study also finds that while Amazon holds a dominant leadership position in the public cloud market, Microsoft and Google are closing that gap.

LogicMonitor, the leading SaaS-based performance monitoring platform for Enterprise IT, sponsored the survey, polling both AWS re:Invent attendees and industry analysts, media, consultants and vendor strategists to explore what the landscape for cloud services will look like in 2020. "Our customers continue to ask for guidance in planning their cloud migration strategies," said Jeff Behl, Chief Product Officer for LogicMonitor. "We designed our survey to gather feedback from some key industry influencers to understand their predictions, and to provide our customers with insights and answers."

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of the Alibaba Group, announced today that it had completed its assessment for the Cloud Computing Compliance Controls Catalogue (C5) set out by the Federal Office for Information Security in Germany, also known as Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (BSI). Alibaba Cloud is the world's first cloud provider to achieve this attestation with the additional requirements. The attestation covers Elastic Compute Service ("ECS"), Relational Database Service ("RDS"), Object Storage Service ("OSS"), Content Delivery Network ("CDN"), Server Load Balancer ("SLB"), Virtual Private Cloud ("VPC") and Alibaba Cloud Security available on Alibaba Cloud's regions in Singapore and Germany.

Alibaba Cloud's commitment to applying the highest levels of compliance in controls and security is shown by meeting the C5 standard that serves not only as a benchmark for the German market, but also increasingly as a benchmark for institutions across Europe. With the attestation, customers in German states can leverage the work performed under this BSI audit to comply with stringent local requirements and operate secure workloads using Alibaba Cloud services.

C5 is intended primarily for professional cloud service providers, their auditors and customers of the cloud service providers. It has 17 distinct control requirements that the cloud providers either have to comply with or meet defined minimum standards. It is a required assessment for working with the public sector in Germany and is being increasingly adopted by the private sector. The philosophy behind C5 is to unify the currently fragmented certification of cloud provisions that are measured against no agreed standards and possess no coherent oversight.

Turbonomic today announced that it has joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), further advancing its commitment to bring self-managing systems to the cloud-native community and accelerate the adoption of Kubernetes. CNCF is committed to sustaining and integrating open source technologies like Kubernetes and Prometheus.

"CNCF is thrilled to have the support of organizations across the globe, like Turbonomic, contributing to diverse industries - each collectively focused on fueling more rapid adoption of cloud-native computing through open source technologies," said Dan Kohn, Executive Director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Druva, the global leader in cloud data protection and management, today announced the results of its Druva 2017 AWS Cloud Data Protection Survey, which reveals a disconnect between the perceptions of cloud data protection and its reality. The survey solicited insights from IT professionals across 20 industries, including technology, energy, financial and healthcare, regarding the state of Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud adoption, enterprise secondary storage, data protection and archiving needs.

According to results, one of the biggest benefits seen from those who have already moved their data to the cloud is cost savings (59 percent); yet 49 percent of respondents who are considering a move cite cost as the number one barrier. This paradox is indicative of a larger misconception about the capabilities of cloud technology. Despite rising confidence in durability and availability of company data in AWS, concerns remain around storage and usage costs.

The Armor Guardian Partner Program announced today six additional partners, increasing its international presence and channel partners that hold a number of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft partner competencies. Armor, a cloud security service provider, offers a community-powered approach to security with the industry's first threat prevention and response platform, Spartan, designed for private, hybrid and public cloud environments including AWS and Azure.

"In the last twelve months, revenue through our channel efforts has accelerated by 400 percent and we look forward to carrying that momentum into the new year with the expansion of our presence in the United Kingdom, France, Poland and Greater Toronto area," said Chris Drake, founder and CEO of Armor. "Partners that are advising, migrating and managing important customer applications in the cloud recognize Armor's unique ability to accelerate their business by taking the burden of cloud security and compliance away from clients."

Worldwide spending on industry cloud in the finance industry (banking, insurance, and securities and investment services combined) is expected to reach $3.2 billion in 2017, which represents an increase of 26% over 2016, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Semiannual Industry Cloud Tracker. IDC expects the amount to more than double in 2021, amassing total worldwide spending of $7.2 billion.

The manufacturing industry (both discrete and process combined) was a larger spender on industry cloud though, relative to its finance counterpart. This industry is expected to spend $4.2 billion in 2017 and achieve year-over-year growth of 23% in 2018. Similar to the finance industry, the manufacturing industry is also set to double its 2017 spending in 2021, reaching a total of $9.2 billion by then.

However, these two industries pale in comparison when matched against the spending might of healthcare providers. IDC forecasts healthcare providers across the world will spend a total of $8.9 billion in adopting industry cloud solutions during 2017. This industry is expected to increase spending by 20% year over year in 2018 on industry cloud solutions; by 2021, the same industry will spend a staggering $17.6 billion on industry cloud.

Liquidware, a leading 3rd party provider of platform-agnostic end-user computing solutions, today announced the general availability of Stratusphere UX 6.0, a user experience monitoring and diagnostics solution for physical desktops, virtual and cloud-based workspaces. Stratusphere UX has received a major architectural change with this release, scaling to support the capture of far more user, machine and application metrics and information. The solution has also added features to support application strategy, application visibility as well as support for new end-devices.

"We have put significant resources behind this version of Stratusphere UX," said David Bieneman, CEO and co-founder, Liquidware. "Architectural enhancements and the addition of a Stratusphere Collector Appliance now allow the solution to extend visibility and capture more in-guest details, while also increasing overall responsiveness and reporting." The new architecture of Stratusphere UX will better support enterprise environments with a platform scale increase of 400 percent and increases of 40 percent in interface responsiveness and over 100 percent in reporting time.

Deriving value quickly and efficiently from the tremendous amount of data available to service providers is critical to improving business performance and customer experience. However, the demands of the digital world require real-time data that is uniformly available, and more scalable, flexible and accessible data processing than ever before.

Nokia Data Refinery (formerly Comptel Data Refinery) provides intelligent fast data processing to power complex event processing, mediation convergence and consolidation solutions. It captures and processes siloed data of any type and from any source, including data from customers, applications, connected devices, networks, locations and services. It then refines and enriches that data with important contextual information and delivers it in real-time and in the right format to any business application, enabling service providers to deliver new personalized digital experiences.

According to The Forrester Wave, Cloud Solutions report, "Citrix differentiates with its process and security offerings. Citrix provides cloud and hybrid deployment options for ShareFile, its EFSS offering. Customers can share and collaborate on files, as well as get approvals or eSignatures in the context of a business process. It supports large files - up to 100 GB - by default. Customers can protect content with data loss prevention (DLP), mark sensitive items with configurable watermarking tools, and execute auditable transactions with digital signature support."

According to new research from Kaspersky Lab, 35 percent of businesses admit that they are unsure if certain pieces of corporate information are stored on company servers or on those of their cloud providers. Businesses are rapidly adopting cloud-based services to leverage cost savings, but the new report shows that this is leaving them unable to safeguard and account for business data, which puts them at risk to the effects of a potential third-party data breach.

Cloud services are enabling companies to take advantage of key technologies to support day-to-day operations and growth plans - without having to worry about maintenance or a hefty price tag. Therefore, it's no surprise that 78 percent of businesses are already using at least one Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) based platform, and nearly the same amount (75%) are also planning to move more applications to the cloud in the future. When it comes to Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), nearly half (49%) of enterprises and 45 percent of SMBs are looking to outsource IT infrastructure and processes to third-parties.

Tintri announced Tintri FlexDrive this week, a storage expansion feature that enables customers of Tintri all-flash storage arrays to increase system capacity to meet a specific storage need, by adding as little as one drive at a time.

Tintri’s approach to expansion is distinguished by its granularity. Since Tintri operates at the VM-level and eliminates the need for traditional storage constructs, customers can purchase a partially populated EC6000 all-flash array and: